How do we understand ambiguous state activities? How do state actors interpret, use, and produce ambiguous classifications? By asking what explains the simultaneous classification of Filipinos as ...citizens, nationals, and aliens during U.S. imperial rule, this article draws attention to modern states’ ideological commitments and the foundational role of concerns over race in shaping state institutions and ambiguous practices. In debating how to rule over Filipinos, U.S. state actors wrestled with tensions between territorial expansion and limiting the rights of nonwhite people. They institutionalized ambiguity into the legal architecture of the state. The coexistence of seemingly contradictory statuses was enabled by the decisions of the highest court in the land and reflected national and imperial conflicts over belonging. Debates over national boundaries—over who can belong—are key to understanding the structural sources of ambiguity in statecraft. In the United States, these questions are fundamentally about race.
In the past 20 years, scholars of top sociology and race and ethnicity articles increasingly have mentioned the term “color line.” Prominent among them are sociologists concerned with how incoming ...waves of Latin American and Asian immigration, increasing rates of intermarriage, and a growing multiracial population will affect the U.S. racial order. While much of this work cites Du Bois, scholars stray from his definition of the color line in two ways. First, they characterize the color line as unidimensional and Black–white rather than as many divisions between non-white people and whites. Second, scholars portray the color line as the outcome of microlevel factors rather than the product of international geopolitical arrangements. I contend that in contrast to scholarship that portrays immigrants and intermarried and multiracial people as shifting the color line, international and imperial policies related to immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification are longstanding sites of the construction of the U.S. racial order. Scholars should conceptualize the United States as an empire state in order to analyze the international political history of multiple color lines. In doing so, they can distinguish between differences in kind and degree of racial divisions.
This article, which also serves as the introduction for this special guest‐edited issue, examines the history of Rural Sociology's scholarly engagement with rurality, race, and ethnicity. We examine ...the historical patterns of how Rural Sociology has addressed race and ethnicity, and then present results from a meta‐analysis of empirical articles published between 1971 and 2020. Over time, the methodological approaches and scholarly focus of articles on race and ethnicity within Rural Sociology has gradually expanded to include more analyses of power and inequality using constructivist perspectives, and greater numbers of qualitative inquiries into the lived experiences of both white and nonwhite people. The articles featured in the special issue extend from Rural Sociology's growing attention to race and ethnicity. Together, they suggest the ways in which rural spaces are racially coded, how intersections with race and ethnicity exacerbate rural inequality, how the domination of people and the environment are co‐constituted, and how practices of racism are embedded within contextually specific ecologies. In drawing attention to these contributions, we suggest future directions for the discipline's engagement with rurality, race, and ethnicity, while simultaneously suggesting the ways in which our own disciplinary racial reckoning remains incomplete.
Agrarianism is important in the American mythos. Land represents both a set of values and a store of wealth. In this article, we ask how land matters in the lives of rural, southern, Black farmland ...owners. Drawing on 34 interviews, we argue that, since the end of slavery, land has continued to operate as a site of racialized exclusion. Local white elites limit Black farmers’ access to landownership through discriminatory lending practices. At the same time, Black farmland owners articulate an ethos in which land is a source of freedom, pride, and belonging. This we term “Black agrarianism.” They cultivate resistance to the legacies of slavery and sharecropping and contemporary practices of social closure. These Black farmland owners, then, view land as protection from white domination. Thus, we demonstrate how landownership is a site for the re‐creation of racial hierarchy in the contemporary period while also offering the potential for resistance and emancipation.
Striving for Sacred Quisumbing King, Katrina
Journal of contemporary ethnography,
08/2016, Volume:
45, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This essay is an account of how young people, deeply committed to sustainability, struggle to live according to their beliefs. In light of a growing population, limited arable land, and possible food ...shortages, an organization known as Students for Sustainable Agriculture (SSA) responds to the threat of industrial agriculture. These students strive to do what is good for the earth, good for their bodies, and good for their community. They do so by revering food and creating a set of practices that distinguish them as believers in sustainable agriculture. Still, practical difficulties of everyday life make it difficult for them to live by the rules they create. As students living in a wealthy country, contending with environmental degradation, SSA’ers attempt to negotiate their moral commitments with what they can effectually realize. To align their practices with their articulated morals, SSA’ers make alternative consumption choices. Like others who struggle to live according to a set of principles that run counter to what is easy and convenient, these students strive to live true to their beliefs. They try to avoid losses in moral strength, and they repent for situations in which their actions contradict the rules that govern their moral world.
This dissertation is about how U.S. state actors and elites managed the tensions of being a nation state with imperial ambitions in the Philippines. I trace the conflict over expanding territorially ...and limiting the rights of colonial subjects through U.S. conquest, rule, and decolonization of the archipelago. The point of departure for this project is Downes v. Bidwell (1901), in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the Philippines and other colonies were “foreign in a domestic sense.” This phrase meant that the territories belonged to, but were not part of, the United States. In a second decision, Gonzales v. Williams (1904), the Court ruled that colonial subjects would be classified as nationals, blending responsibilities of citizens with the exclusions applied to aliens. These legal ambiguities allowed U.S. state actors to manage imperial tensions of claiming sovereignty over new territories while not extending the reciprocal rights for inhabitants. Drawing on data from over fifteen archives, I show how U.S. took advantage of ambiguity. First, state agents interpreted “foreign in a domestic sense” in competing forms, producing co-existing classifications of Filipinos as citizens, nationals, and aliens. Second, drawing on the possibility of defining Filipinos as “foreign,” U.S. Congress revoked social and juridical citizenship from over 200,000 Filipino veterans of WWII. Third, U.S. Congress continued to treat the Philippine territory as “domestic” by securing a fifty-year lease on military bases and natural resources rights for U.S. investors (equaling those of Philippine citizens). Overall, I show how institutionalized ambiguity enabled the persistence of inequality in citizenship, social welfare benefits, and geopolitical arrangements in the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that institutionalized ambiguity, alongside legibility projects, enables state actors to negotiate the tensions of empire in the rule of colonial territories and peoples.
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